It is hard to go beyond your public. If they are satisfied with cheap performance, you will not easily arrive at better. If they know what is good, and require it. you will aspire and burn until you achieve it. But from time to time, in history, men are born a whole age too soon.
Ralph Waldo EmersonWhat opium is instilled into all disaster? It shows formidable as we approach it, but there is at last no rough rasping friction,but the most slippery sliding surfaces. We fall soft on a thought.
Ralph Waldo EmersonBe as beneficent as the sun or the sea, but if your rights as a rational being are trenched on, die on the first inch of your territory.
Ralph Waldo EmersonI must feel pride in my friend's accomplishments as if they were mine,--and a property in his virtues. I feel as warmly when he ispraised, as the lover when he hears applause of his engaged maiden.
Ralph Waldo EmersonThe moment our discourse rises above the ground-line of familiar facts, and is inflamed with passion or exalted thought, it clothes itself in images. A man conversing in earnest, if he watch his intellectual processes, will find that always a material image, more or less luminous, arises in his mind, contemporaneous with every thought, which furnishes the vestment of the thought.... This imagery is spontaneous. It is the blending of experience with the present action of the mind. It is proper creation.
Ralph Waldo Emerson